A bit of history:
The Model 11 has been on the drawing table and various fore/aft
burners for some time. I constructed the first prototype well over a
year ago. A few months later I mentioned it in a private conversation
with a customer who then leaked the term "Evil Twin" to the internet.
So despite being very tight-lipped about it from then on, the word's
been out there for some time. We actually had a built-up faceplate
in my laptop bag at the last Namm show which we never showed. The
general public, especially musicians are smart enough to realize that
a dead faceplate is not a module and I see no reason to insult them by
trying to pass off a ringer.
You may be asking...with over 34 filters in the Eurorack stable, why
am I doing this? It's a good question, especially considering many of
them are at a price-point Plan B can never meet. Even with that
stacked against its success, I still felt there was a spotlightremaining. First, dogs love trucks and musicians love filters.
Secondly, how many of those 34 are merely variations of one another?
Third and most important - things have changed and I wanted to get
on board. In the 1970's the call to action was to produce the
cleanest, warmest filter imaginable and the Model 12 speaks to this by
being one of the prettiest in the Eurorack herd. But we all know the
70's were retarded and shit...sometimes you don't want warm and fuzzy. Sometimes you want demented. With the 12 and now the 11 we are
covering both bases.
During the course of its development, most of which occurred while
driving to Tucson for Tapeop '07 and at various solo trips to Analogue
Haven, I considered many options. At one point the Evil Twin was
slated to be dual - two locked together by a single set of controls
which could be configured either in parallel or serially to one another. I envisioned a Waldorf-esque graphical interface: LEDs which would indicate through faceplate graphics and lights which config was in play and to what degree, with an offset knob so you could dial a center frequency spread between them. Then I was thinking I would VC that spread...then put a crossfader for parallel/serial mixtures, then a VC to that as well. Problem is I'd have to charge for all that and in the end I opted to stick to the basics and spend the bucks making a single filter as solid as possible instead of focusing on all that other crap I'd have to hang off of it. Besides the parallel filter idea is not new and already out there in Eurorack. What I finalized was an offshoot of the prototype I had built before although in it's final version I went with an all-discrete core and in the process of buffing that out tripped (literally) onto something big:
There are many ways to feedback a filter, thus many ways to bring it
into high resonance with no two sounding alike. During the
course of it's tenure, the now-famous Steiner Multimode used four
different methods and while noodling with the 11 I tried to keep in
mind something my buddy Nyle Steiner had once told me: design with
your ears, not your slide rule. This means violating the circuit with
test cables and decade boxes and listening if anything interesting talks back. I tested many different resonance options, some good, some not and by complete accident popped in a new feedback path before removing a previous routing and I got lucky as it turned out to be the 11's defining moment. I had heard many filters before...but never this. In the end, I brought that twin feedback path into the circuit via a switch thus doubling it's timbral personality.
One more bit of trivia: The Evil Twin gets its name metaphorically as
the Model 12's retarded brother, yet obviously also works in
connection with it's twin feedback architecture.
The 11 has been an awfully long time coming and I am very excited about it. I think it's got a lot of potential and in a couple of days you'll be able to decide for yourself - look for it's official release later this week.
)...
Aber man kann das Verhältnis Signal/Self.Osc über den Input Level Poti variieren und muss dann auf ein leichtes Anzerren des Originalsignals verzichten. Mich stört das nicht, da es bei einer dominanten Eigenschw. meiner Meinung nach nicht nötig ist.
